Roger Owen (1935–2018)

Abstract

E. R. J. Owen – known to his family, friends and colleagues as Roger – died on 23 December 2018 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of eighty-three. Over the course of a long and distinguished career Roger produced pioneering scholarly work of lasting importance on many different dimensions of the economic, political and social history of the modern Middle East, a field in whose intellectual advancement he played a key role over the past half-century. A great many younger academics (myself among them) were inspired by his scholarship’s analytical breadth and depth, its critical edge and its suspicion of received wisdom, lazy thinking and easy answers. But we also benefited personally from Roger’s generosity and support, and eventually came to enjoy his warm friendship. Roger Owen’s death is of course a grievous loss for his family, friends and